Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday June 15, 2010 @10:55AM
from the neal-cassady-and-the-star-wars-kid dept.

dward90 writes "The Guggenheim Museum in New York has begun a program to submit YouTube videos to be declared High Art. From PCW: 'Are your YouTube videos so good they deserve to be in a museum? Thanks to a partnership between Google and the Guggenheim Museum in New York you stand, at least, a remote chance. The search giant and one of the most famed museums in the world for modern and contemporary art are collaborating on a new project called YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. The project will showcase up to 20 video works submitted to YouTube at the Guggenheim in New York on October 21, and online at YouTube.com/Play.'"

Our society has already accepted that video is a legitimate form of artistic expression, and there are movies that are considered high art. Youtube is just a distribution medium, so if video can be high art so can Youtube video.

In traditional media outlets, the production of video is wholly choreographed by professionals with typically years of experience and education.

I don't think the question is "Can video be art?", but more succinctly "Can amateur video be considered high art?"

Undoubtedly the answer is yes. But if you browse youtube, I think you'll find it takes quite a lot of searching to find really well made video that could be considered high art. The only one I can think of off the top of my head, I can't even find right

But if you browse youtube, I think you'll find it takes quite a lot of searching to find really well made video that could be considered high art.

Sooo, pretty much the same as any medium then?

[As an aside, I've never understood the whining by the MPAA that "youtube is all our stuff! (waaahhh)". The best stuff on youtube, by far, is original work, much of it by amateurs (something which no doubt makes the MPAA's blood run cold...).]

See, thats where the twist lies. Youtube has grown to be more than just a medium. It's an entire sub culture of the internet. I think where they are going with this is,

"is your youtube video considered High Art and manages to get half a million views in a weekend? "

I think thats what they are getting at. Calling it "Viral Art" just doesn't sound right, I guess. Any video that is considered art could be uploaded to Youtube and thus becomes Youtube Art, therefor nullifying the whole idea. I think what they ar

Did somebody question whether youtube videos could be art? The Guggenheim already said they would have an exhibit. The only question is which videos will be selected.

The other question is whether youtube videos play any better at the Guggenheim than they do on your PC at home, i.e. do we really need a Guggenheim any more? Artists love exploring those kids of questions so I'm sure it is part of the purpose of the exhibit.

Name me one major folk artist or work of folk art that is more than two centuries old without looking it up. I expect that you cannot do it. Almost all folk art over time becomes marginal to culture and society, primarily because it is very localized in scope and appeal to the time and place that it was created. The artists and works that are most commonly remembered transcend time and place.

Obviously I can't name folk artists (almost by definition), but a if I ask you to think about a culture (especially a non-western one), chances are you're going to picture their folk art and architecture.

You're mostly right, but I'm not sure that helps your original point, that the cultural values of the underclasses don't survive.

No, there aren't widely known exemplars of folk art, but that's basically axiomatic. However, the thousands of Buddha statues, and shinto shrines, the countless cave painting, embroidery and lace samplers, etc, etc. are examples of the underclasses values and arts surviving.

As for fairy tales, and epic poems, the author is almost universally some unknown traveling bard, not Aesop

he point is that the middle and upper classes are the ultimate gatekeepers of what survives the centuries culturally because the lower class is, in the civilized world, too fickle to keep teaching the same things generation upon generation, as the middle and upper classes do with the great works of the Greeks and Romans.

Two points, first, of course the upper classes act as gatekeepers for culture. The history of human civilization is uneducated masses looking up to their social superiors. Second, it's not

Interesting assertion. Perhaps that was true in the case that you refer too, but it is not true in the case of America. By all rights, the pioneer/cowboy archetype/culture was considered an underclass...as compared to the Southern Dandies and the Yankee Industrialists. Yet, cowboy values and culture are still a very inherent part of our national identity. Or did you think all that self-made, independent, rugged, manly huff and puff that we Americans put up was just a bunch of bullshit we pulled out of thin

"Cowboy values" are just a derogatory way of stating a value for honest hard work, self-reliance, and common decency. Those things predate the cowboy by a century or two, and were common in the colonial Americans as a matter of nature (only people who were daring or had nothing to lose would come to the colonies in the beginning) and of necessity. You ever hear of the 'Protestant work ethic'?

The cowboy was essentially the colonial culture twice distilled. Where the colonies were founded by only those peop

Hmmmm. Well I didn't really put much effort into making my case, but you still ignored my point entirely. Whether or not, 'cowboy values,' are the products of other cultural lineage (which, I have no doubt, they are) has little to do with my assertion that those same frontiersmen, pioneers, colonial settlers, etc. were, during their respective time periods, considered members of an underclass (or, at the very best, an alternative class). Either way, they were not members of an elite social order. Yet, their

I didn't ignore your point, I invalidated your point. Self-reliance was a key value in the whole of colonial society from top to bottom. You can see the elite founding fathers, who were landed gentry to a man, talking about that sort of thing all the time because it was prerequisite to getting a population onboard with the concept of independence. The 'cowboys' did not originate these things, they perpetuated these things, only because they were among the last group of people to display these values in a ro

Also, don't worry too much. Here in NYC (my family has a long history of working in restoration in a number of NYC museums) the Guggenheim isn't really taken terribly seriously, and really hasn't been since a certain musician famously intoned upon its completion: "Christ, it looks like a giant toilet!".

For a higher consistent caliber of a similar kind of media and form, check out the Whitney. Maybe they'll do a deal with Vimeo.

Are you taking a shot at the museum or it's architecture? Say what you will about the way the museum is run, but Frank Lloyd Wright's genius cannot be questioned. His building is the best piece of artwork in the Guggenheim collection.

They're just trying to stay relevant in the modern age by rubbing themselves up against a current trend. Sad to see a myrmidon of Art feel that it needs to chase tasteless consumer idiots. Youtube videos are definitely vulgar "art" in that they are seldom produced by Artists. The videos in some cases may be safely considered craftsmanship.

One mans art is another mans ruined block of stone or smeared oil mess on canvas. I don't doubt that some videos by people you otherwise wouldn't consider artists can be viewed as such but I'm at a loss as to why we would want to pay an admission to see videos you can see at home, or on your phone.

This isn't art that was hand crafted and could potentially be more beautiful in person.

You pay for the curation of the videos. Anyone can go watch random YouTube videos. Anyone can curate their own show for their friends. Heck, you can probably even put together a playlist and share it through whatever medium you want. It all comes down to the curation though.

Why don't you burn an Henri Rousseau painting while you're at it? Art is not the captive of schools and demagogues. Just because somebody doesn't have some kind of background or pedigree does not automatically make their product irrelevant, tasteless, or vulgar (connotatively as a negative, it remains denotatively vulgar as a neutral {funny, the spell checker thinks 'connotatively' is a word but not 'denotatively'}).

With Debian Squeeze flash *usually* works (in IceWeasel/SwiftFox), but occasionally the sound will glitch and repeat the same half a second sound over and over again for about 5 minutes at a time. That's when I break out some techno and scream "REEEEMIXXXX!"...You should try that some time;p

I have a hard time accepting the "digital arts" as "high art". Art in itself is the use of human abilities to describe human experience (perceived or imagined). Once you accept enough computer capability into the practice, you blur, or even jump over, the line separating computer and human design. Digital video and computer animation skip right over that line as far as I am concerned. The computers involved do such a massive majority of the work that all the human as to do is *design*. While those designs m

Maybe the Guggenheim has changed in the last 15 years, but the last time I was there nearly every piece of "art" that I saw was some pointless sculpture. For example, one sculpture was just barbed wire wrapped around a tree trunk. This is art? I only remember one piece that I liked in the entire museum (a painting of a lobster and a cat done by Picasso, I think). This is the perfect place to show off awful, pointless videos. They'll fit right in.

Kandinsky said that. If he was alive today he'd be a vlogger / blogger, and would have a DeviantArt account I have no doubt.
The fine art world is bunk, they've been exploring the same things since the abstract expressionists came out, there hasn't been a movement since postmodernism.
The new media are here.
Galleries no longer decide what is seen, they're merely a showcase now. Having your video played in the Guggenheim is inferior in every way to posting it on Youtube, and they know that... and they'